Free speech at risk
Harris-Walz would unleash tyranny
X CEO Elon Musk met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in June 2023 in New York City. The photo is from the Prime Minister’s Office via Wikipedia.
This presidential election will determine far more than who leads the country the next 4 years.
After all, elections have consequences, and this election will determine what level of free speech Americans will experience, especially on social media.
Do you trust the government to determine “misinformation” and “hate” online? After all, their “covid misinformation” proved to be true. Or do you want the First Amendment?
The election is less than 60 days away and elections across the globe the past two years produced multiple nations lurching toward online totalitarianism.
Consider the largest South American country, Brazil, with an election in 2022. It has descended into dictatorship. The description is not hyperbolic because the nation reacted this way in a free speech demonstration yesterday.
Oliver Wiseman reported Sept. 3 for The Free Press:
As of last Friday (Aug. 30, emphasis mine), the Elon Musk–owned platform is no longer accessible in the largest country in South America. And if any of the 22 million Brazilians with X accounts are caught attempting to log in via a VPN, they face fines of $8,900 per day. . . .
The legal fight that culminated in Brazil’s Twitter block started with an initiative to clamp down on the kind of right-wing fake news that the American elite has been fretting about since 2016. Alexandre de Moraes, the controversial Brazilian judge leading the censorship push, was granted sweeping powers to order platforms to ban users ahead of the 2022 Brazilian election as part of an effort to combat hate speech and misinformation.
It’s a blatant attack on an American company. The U.S. State Department, perhaps even Sec. of State Antony Blinken himself, has the power to respond to Brazil.
However, it’s crickets from Blinken, President Joe Biden, and Vice President Kamala Harris. It’s also deafening silence from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others in the legacy media. Ditto the American Civil Liberties Union, the Anti-Defamation League, and groups with a history of defending free speech, even speech for which they disagree.
There are multiple examples over time of the ACLU defending Nazis and the KKK The ACLU defends it in a seven-page document on their website.
One can hear the flippant objections about Brazil being irrelevant. Tell that to former Clinton Labor Secretary and Berkeley Professor Robert Reich. Wiseman reported that Reich in “writing in The Guardian (in early September, emphasis mine), he called on ‘regulators around the world’ to ‘threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X.’ ”
Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer displays more enthusiasm for crushing social media speech on mass migration and gender ideology than prosecuting people who harm British citizens.
Also, France arrested Telegram founder Pavel Durov for the crime of insufficient content moderation. In Canada, Justin Trudeau crushed the trucker convoy protest against vaccine mandates by giving his government sweeping new powers to freeze bank accounts of those funding the protests.
So don’t think, “That would never happen here.”
This is Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris via her X account.
Kamala Harris has acknowledged she would do it here and here.
The Twitter files proved governing elites censored ideas they regarded as “misinformation.” The censorship also included the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. “Misinformation” was always eliminating speech governing elites don’t like.
Dr. Anthony Fauci and others pushed the following during covid:
We need to lock down for “15 days to flatten the curve.”
We need to close colleges, schools and preschools.
We need to wear face masks.
We need 6-foot social distancing.
We can’t rely on natural immunity to covid.
Get the covid vaccines and boosters because they are “safe and effective.”
All rubbish!
With free speech, Americans receive robust debate on ideas. That public debate exposes Americans to different perspectives surrounding issues so people can be fully informed about how to proceed.
There was no public debate during the pandemic. Anyone who challenged the narratives was censored or canceled. Imagine what a genuine public debate of how to proceed during the pandemic would have saved the nation. There has been no accountability and no humility to acknowledge wrongdoing.
Yet, as reporter Michael Shellenberger reported on Labor Day, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz both favor European digital information censorship. Former President Barack Obama has said American democracy depends on censorship, and he favors amending the U.S. Constitution to make that happen.
Worse, a recent poll by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression revealed Americans believe the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution goes too far. Ryan Foley wrote for The Christian Post:
‘Evidently, one out of every two Americans wishes they had fewer civil liberties,’ Chief Research Advisor Sean Stevens lamented. ‘Many of them reject the right to assemble, to have a free press, and to petition the government. This is a dictator’s fantasy.’
Americans must heed the words of former President Harry Truman:
‘Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.’
That’s chilling.
